What is a Knowledge Society according to Joseph Stiglitz

In many interviews and articles Joseph Stiglitz has strongly criticized the European policy regarding the management of the financial crisis. That is also why he was in Denmark: to tell what his vision is of how Denmark and other European countries need to reduce their budget deficit.

According to Stiglitz, the European approach is inaccurate and only focused on a short-term thinking (how to come out of this crisis as quickly as possible). The recipe is simple: put the knife in spending and start saving. In the long term, Stiglitz believes that these operations will turn out negative. Countries should be investing properly in order to ensure future growth. 

Stiglitz says that the investments will have to go to three areas: education, infrastructure and technology. Education has a special need, because Stiglitz argues that there are fewer young people who are graduating in countries like Denmark & the Netherlands compared with the global competition. 

In addition, he also sees an other development within education. Countries such as India and China have ambitious goals in terms of quality of education. China's aim is to have ten universities of top/world quality in the next ten years. In order to reach this objective China is already investing heavily in the future of education. As a result, Stiglitz believes that the landscape of where knowledge comes from will change. Therefore, if you want to compete, you must invest in education, but also in for example research. Research fosters the development of new technologies. 
  
Denmark - and the Netherlands - will not so anymore become the heart of where knowledge is produced. These countries should therefore have first-class technologies in order to absorb knowledge. Denmark and the Netherlands should excel in these technologies and the infrastructure for this in order to get knowledge elsewhere. Such a technology and infrastructure is the Internet: which is a kind knowledge economy. Technology is therefore crucial to invest in as a country so that the country can easily become a part of a knowledge economy. 

We must therefore not miss out the opportunity we no have in the world: first-class infrastructure and technologuy. The image below shows the advantage North America and Europe has. This image shows the amount of Internet users in the world. Europe is very well represented here. But for how long? This image represents the scene of 2001 and because we all know that especially the development of technology is growing rapidly, we should not waste time. It took for example Google only ten years ago to become so important for the public as it is now. 

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide Internet users who lived there in 2002 via  www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=336